Does Padian mean Wesley Elsberry, Shallit’s sidekick, whose PhD is from the wildlife fisheries department at Texas A&M? Does Padian mean Richard Wein, whose 50,000 word response to my book NO FREE LUNCH is widely cited — Wein holds no more than a bachelors degree in statistics? Does Padian mean Elliott Sober, who is a philosopher and whose critique of my work along Bayesian lines is itself deeply problematic (for my response to Sober go here). Does he mean Thomas Schneider, who is a biologist who dabbles in information theory and not very well at that (see my “withering critique” with Bob Marks of his work on the evolution of nucleotide binding sites here). Does he mean David Wolpert, a co-discoverer of the NFL theorems? Wolpert had some nasty things to say about my book NO FREE LUNCH, but the upshot was that my ideas there were not sufficiently developed mathematically for him to critique them.

Yes, Dr. Dembski. He means people who do math, regardless of their degrees.

Does he mean William Dembski, an obscure discredited mathematician at an obscure southern Bible college with no training in biology?

Embedded within Dembski's quote was a perfect example of the (unwitting) irony that UD so consistently and endearingly provides.

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Wolpert had some nasty things to say about my book NO FREE LUNCH, but the upshot was that my ideas there were not sufficiently developed mathematically for him to critique them.

Seriously, that's the upshot? Wahooo! ID is saved!

Having the Isaac Newton of ID admit his own ideas are insufficiently developed is funny, but the kicker is that, just two paragraphs below that sentence, he blithely quotes his supporter Lennox saying...

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Using recent information-theoretic “no free lunch” theorems, he shows in particular that evolutionary algorithms are by their very nature incapable of generating the complex specified information which lies at the heart of living systems.

That's quite a concrete conclusion for an insufficiently developed idea. It made me wonder if the disembodied telic entity gave Dembski the ability to detect irony. At least, I wondered until the last paragraph of his rant.

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It seems that the modus operandi of ID critics is this: Imagine what you would most like to be wrong with ID and its proponents and then simply, bald-facedly accuse ID and its proponents of being wrong in that way. It’s called wish-fulfillment.

That'd be a big, fat NO

--------------"Believe it or not, it really helps that the other side thinks we’re such morons." -Dembski

The ID epiphany: Nothing in ID makes sense until you accept they're trying to look stupid.